He also pledged that his American Recover and Reinvestment Act would strive to do the same. In fact, that encouraging family of "Re" words - recover, reinvest, restore, renew, rebuild, revitalize - are a good bet to compete for Word of the Year honors.

Alas "transform" might prove too familiar to rev up the linguistic search engines that track the candidates at Merriam-Webster unlike past WOTY winners like "bailout," "facebook" or "google." But it's a word I suspect we're going to hear more and more of. Unless something big changes....errr transforms.